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Times of uncertainty inevitably bring with
them an interest in the future. The unanchored feelings of the time lead us to
wonder how things might turn out. A preoccupation with the future reflects a
concern with what might become of us. These imagined futures are always
political. They reaffirm, they scare, they motivate, and they limit. They also
project meaning, justify and legitimate, promote nihilism or hope, invigorate
and inspire or undermine and demoralise.

Given the uncertainty we are currently experiencing
a renewed and intense interest in imagining a post-capitalist future shouldn’t
be too much of a surprise. Our intensifying uncertainty is translated into the
urgency with which our imaginations are called upon. What will emerge after these
escalating disruptions to apparently established social orders? How can we make
sense of our present through our imagined futures?

Brexit looms. Trump leers. Populism shouts.
Reactionary politics casts long shadows. The right and left tear at themselves
and stretch outwards. International tensions simmer. This seems like an
appropriate moment for re-envisioning, and contributions to this process are arriving
at some pace. Peter Frase’s engaging short bookFour Futures: Life After capitalism is
another addition to this collective reimagining.

For those looking for some solace Frase
provides little comfort. His is a book that conjures up worrying and
intimidating visions. Its frequent talk of scarcity means that I can’t seem to
shake the dystopian film Mad Max from my mind. It’s
not that Frase is talking of the same lawless and desolate landscape in which fuel
is the only currency and the means of survival, it’s just a vision of the future
that has stuck with me. Despite being unrecognisable, Mad Max always felt so plausible.

Fortunately, Frase provides some
alternatives. Indeed, his book sketches out four possible futures for ‘life
after capitalism.’ Having a selection of options is perhaps no more comforting
than one dystopian image, but at least there’s a smatter of hope dotted among some
of the more appealing sets of outcomes that he provides.

Frase doesn’t provide a clear set of
actions or dwell in futurism—his book seems to leave it to the reader to try to
reverse-engineer the futures that they want. But the author, who admits to
being ‘deliberately hyperbolic,’ is clear that collective action around a
shared vision is what’s required. Yet there is a pulse of inevitability driving
the book forward, not an inevitability of outcome but an inevitability that
things will need to change. There are two trends pushing at this sense of the
inevitable: the increasing automation of work and the emergence of profound
environmental changes. These two interconnected issues mean that transition of
some form will be forced upon us.

Of course, Frase couldn’t have foreseen all
of the political upheavals that occurred in 2016. These changes add a further
sense of cultural and political inevitability to Frase’s arguments. Reading the
book in November 2016 forces some reflection on how future horizons may have
been re-set by political opportunities and complex groundswells of opinion. The
book’s future visions arrive as we hear claims of making things ‘great again’, with
frequent calls on evocative and nostalgic versions of an imagined past, as
discussed recently in Owen Hatherley’s book The Ministry of Nostalgia.

I was left to wonder how versions of the
past meet visions of the future to embolden political perspectives. The events
of recent times are certain to force a shifting of these future horizons,
especially as major events and incremental alterations to the social fabric
compound. In short, we will be seeing the future differently as the
circumstances in which we live continue to shift.

Frase uses two intersecting spectrums to explore
the potential futures he discusses. On the one hand, we have a spectrum running
from inequality to hierarchy. On the other, we have scarcity to abundance.
Mapping across these spectrums, Frase ends up outlining a typology of four
futures: communism, rentism, socialism and exterminism.

These are familiar perhaps, but Frase
revisits them in some intriguing ways. He uses various illustrations to give a
sense of materiality to these four possible futures. The relationship between
power and the bundles of technologies that are embodied in robots, for example,
brings with it an urgency for seeing how these technologies are presented and
then deployed to enforce hierarchies. The role of intellectual property in
power structures is revealing. The careful unpicking of the relationship
between scarcity and hierarchy is also telling, as are the combinations of the
different factors of inequality and abundance.

But despite these insights, Frase can’t
quite escape the shackles of the typology he has set for himself. I started
wondering what other less familiar positions might be mapped onto these axes,
or how new axes might be imagined. Similarly, I was left wondering about the
tensions that emerge between the different imagined futures or between those who
are invested in them. The book implicitly suggests that these tensions will be
profound, but what about where visions clash or merge into new types of
formations? I wanted a sense of potential hybrids or of the unimaginable.

The book’s structure lends it coherence but
at the same time it sets some limits that are occasionally based a little too
much on established knowledge and concepts. Frase exercises his imagination
beautifully and provocatively within these parameters, but I would have loved
to have seen that same imagination exercised beyond these limits and beyond the
categories that are used in the book.

Re-envisioning the future in the current
moment feels like it needs to draw from an eclectic and unconstrained set of
resources, especially as current uncertainties make this task such a leap of
the imagination. Frase uses fiction and other sources to stimulate his
categories into life, but the use of a wider palette of fiction could have
taken us beyond a set of futures that might have been expected, even if Frase
manages to martial them in creative and unexpected ways.

Frase wants to avoid certainty, which is a
real strength of his book. This is a notable and endearing move. Perhaps we
should all be wary of too much certainty. Given current circumstances, those
who are certain are likely to be misleading themselves and others. Instead
Frase hopes that his book will be used as a kind of ‘self-preventing’ set of
visions. Mapping out possible futures is a political act for Frase, one that he
hopes will be both preventative and potentially empowering. As he puts it, it
is up to us to ‘fight for the futures we want.’

The concluding chapter
of the book calls on Walter
Benjamin’s famous essay on the concept of history. Frase’s focus is on
Benjamin’s point about history being controlled by the victors. In that essay
Benjamin also claims that we are moving backwards into the future, with the
remnants of history piling-up in front of us. Frase’s book might allow us a
quick glimpse over our shoulders into the advancing future, but as Benjamin
points out in relation to history, our concept of the future, like the past, will
be filled with the presence of the now. In other words, the futures we imagine
are products of the times in which we live.

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